Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Alice Quinn
by Marilyn Hacker

from Poetry London, Summer 2007

Alice Quinn, the charismatic and sometimes controversial poetry editor of The New Yorker, now Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America as well, has proved herself an impeccable and courageous critic and scholar of modern poetry with the appearance of Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box, her more-than-annotated edition of the unpublished poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

In the three decades since her death in 1979, the reputation of Elizabeth Bishop as a major American poet has increased in magnitude, even overshadowing that of her friend and coeval Robert Lowell, and eclipsing that of John Berryman, whose work seems now somewhat unjustly ignored by critics, students and general readers.

Among the many studies of her work (and her life) must be named David Kalstone's 1989 Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, Lorrie Goldensohn's 1992 Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poet, and Brett Millier's 1993 Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, as well as innumerable essays by poet-critics as diverse as Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich, a piece for the theatre based on Bishop's letters, and a mildly scandalous novel published in Brazil. Some of these books made reference to, even quoted completely, poems which did not appear in the 1980 276-page The Complete Poems 1927-1979, leaving readers to wonder if, in fact, the critically fastidious Bishop had been more prolific than her oeuvre in print led them to believe.

Two (poignant, erotic) poems salvaged or rescued by the poet-critic Lloyd Schwartz were published in The New Yorker in 1991 in the context of his article 'Annals of Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil'. A dozen other previously unpublished Bishop poems appeared in The New Yorker in the course of the 1990s and early in this decade; others surfaced in American Poetry Review, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, all, we now know, the fruit of Alice Quinn's ongoing research, with the permission of Bishop's literary executor, the life-partner of her last decade.

Readers quoted and copied them; clipped them out; pasted them in notebooks; wondered how they had arrived at the journals and what their eventual disposition might be. Either Elizabeth Bishop was alive in Nova Scotia sending poems to magazines (would that it were true) or there was a body of her work extant and under examination that was much larger than the published books revealed.

In the meantime Alice Quinn was reading, annotating and selecting from the more than thirty-five hundred pages of Bishop's writing extant in the Vassar College Library Department of Special Collections, to which the poet had willed them. From this research she has at last produced a book containing some 200 pages of poems and poem drafts, accompanied by a few prose sketches, facsimile drafts of poems, including 17 stages of the villanelle 'One Art', and 110 pages of informative and lively editorial annotations, placing the poems chronologically, aesthetically, and, as far as is possible, biographically in Bishop's life.

The resulting book is a very good read. It is, in fact, a doubled good read, with the revelation of the poems taking unquestioned precedence, but with a plethora of biobibliographical (and historical) details, rich in quotations from the poet's correspondence and that of her critics, friends and associates in the very discreetly headed 115-page 'Notes: Bibliography; Acknowledgments'. Rarely, if ever, have pages presented as scholarly apparatus been of such lively interest. (Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a novel disguised as scholarly apparatus to a poem; it could have been a mischievous guiding spirit of this book.) Here is a poem which Lloyd Schwartz (in a bit of drama described in a letter to Alice Quinn in the aforesaid notes and bibliography) copied from a notebook of Bishop's in 1974 while he was visiting the poet, then almost 63, in hospital; she had been sent for an X-ray of the broken shoulder that was the cause of her confinement. He kept the poem, unpublished, until Bishop's death and for over 20 years afterwards, hoping it would appear in some official or authorized publication.(The poem was published in The New Yorker in 2002).

Schwartz mentions that the poem has been set to music by the American composer John Harbison as part of a Bishop song cycle, 'North and South', including four other Bishop poems treating love and/or music, among them another previously unpublished poem cited in Schwartz's 1991 essay. This poem, 'Breakfast Song', at least can be said to have acquired a kind of canonical status even before the appearance of Quinn's edition. But it is itself anything but canonical, in its positing of erotic and psychological frankness in a deceptively nursery-rhyme simplicity of language and form:

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I've grown accustomed to?
—Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it's true.
It's just the common case;
there's nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

This is not the Bishop of 'Crusoe in England' or of 'Brazil, January I, 1502'. Nor is it the Bishop of 'Sestina', so discreet that the reader knows neither the cause of the grandmother's tears nor the sex of the child observing her (not easy in English with its ungendered possessive pronouns). This is a poet who, like her beloved Metaphysicals, was struck, like a slap in the face, with the juxtaposition of sexual love and death, but who, unlike them (and their defender, Eliot), had neither the consolation of nor the intellectual struggle with faith and a personal God to figure into the mise en scene and the equation.

If all the uncollected poems were in this register, even were they of this accomplishment, there might have been an argument for leaving them unpublished (at least for another few decades), not because the above poem is confessional (the lover is not named or even gendered); the probable cause of death not specified either; we hope Rochester's 'A Song of a Young Lady: To Her Ancient Lover' was quoted jokingly back across the breakfast table) but because one might posit a poet's, as any other artist's, desire to create a coherent oeuvre.

But the poems on offer in this particular juke-box are, in fact, of an astonishing variety; what they demonstrate is not a side of Bishop that the poet would have preferred to keep hidden, but rather the processes of a poet remarkably exigent with herself who, however, was not only reluctant to destroy drafts, but apt to resuscitate them a year or ten later for development into the fully achieved poems readers know. One could imagine that, had Bishop lived through her eighth decade, knowing her methods and calendars of composition, many of the poems in this collection would have been brought back into the light, perfected (perhaps by the emendation of only a word or two) and published.

There are, in fact, poems in this book in all of Bishop's registers: the demotic, even bluesy dramatic monologue; the wry or fable-like observation of the non-human animal/vegetable/mineral; the elaborated memory of a significant event from childhood or young adulthood, recollected in less than tranquility; the crisp, metrical love-or-disillusion poem by a 20th century Augustan; the interior scenes which violently undomesticate themselves.

Bishop had originally intended the resonant title poem of this book, 'Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box', to close her second collection, A Cold Spring (we learn this from correspondence with her then editor, and from Robert Giroux' conversations with Quinn, all cited in the notes)—a poem she worked on and to which she kept returning until well after the book's publication in 1955. It is a quietly astonishing and resolutely difficult poem, about sex, music, alcohol, poetry itself. It is informed by Bishop's reading and appreciation of Poe, but equally by her reading (in translation) of Baudelaire's 1852 essay on Poe, from which she copied this quotation: 'Is it not a cause for astonishment that this simple idea does not flash into everyone's mind: that progress (insofar as there is progress) perfects sorrow to the same extent that it refines pleasure...' (Sorrow is 'la douleur' in the original, which also means grief and pain.) However, Bishop's text in the front of the book is a poem, whatever ideas and theories it (potently) distills in its 'block of honky-tonks':

As easily as the music falls,
the nickels fall into the slots,
the drinks like lonely water-falls
in night descend the separate throats,
and the hands fall on one another
[down] darker darkness under
tablecloths and all descends...

Sorrow (or grief, or pain) and pleasure are coupled in this poem: 'pleasure is exact, though meretricious/ & knows before exactly what it wants', Bishop wrote in a note towards its composition. The consumption of strong drink is described as at once lonely and communal; so, one feels, is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, here disconnected from love, though not from drink, from music and paradoxically, in its exactness—from poetry. 'Je suis la plaie et le couteau', wrote Baudelaire: wounded by wounding, the source of healing, as well as pleasure, in the source of pain (to be echoed in a shaped poem called 'The Cut' by Bishop's friend May Swenson).

There is a Baudelairean side to Bishop, perhaps most evident in the poems written (completed or in drafts) before her move to Brazil, not only in their revelation of nature in artifice, or vice versa, the epiphanies they experience in low company (think of 'The Prodigal') or their lauding and deploring various states of intoxication, but in the correspondences established between disparate events and emotions.

There is a poem draft, late in the book, called 'Sammy', an elegy for a pet toucan that died accidentally in 1958, when Bishop unwittingly used a poisonous insecticide to delouse him. She worked intermittently on the poem from the time of the event until 1978, referring to it in letters to Lowell in 1958, to May Swenson in 1968, and to Frank Bidart in 1978, with other references in between. Five pages of notes were in her papers. The last line of the last draft is 'I loved you and I caged you' (whose bathos does no justice to the poet).

A poem draft from the late 1930s, untitled, whose first line is 'In a cheap hotel', ends 'He chains me and berates me— / He chains me to that bed and he berates me'. There's already a syntactic and thematic parallel to these lines. But it becomes more evident when one knows that the antecedent of 'He' in the cheap hotel poem is 'Love', a horrid night-clerk out of a Liliana Cavani film. The poet had been reading (mentioned in her notebooks, from the notes again) the grim and baroque account of a woman who chained her son to his bed for a decade to prevent him marrying an 'unsuitable' girl. Quinn as editor also conveys poet-critic Elizabeth Spires' view, after an interview in 1979, the year of Bishop's death, that this line also may have referred to the poet's guilt after the suicide of a close male friend whose marriage proposal she refused—who wrote 'Go to hell, Elizabeth' on a posthumous post card. 'I loved you and I caged you' resonates beyond a dead bird.

Reading some of these poems, one wonders whose exigency excluded them from a book published during Bishop's lifetime. Most often, it was the poet's—but a reader (with the notes at hand) might question how much a rejection from a magazine editor (who, in the case of 'The Soldier and the Slot-Machine', an Audenesque quatrain ballad in the persona of a disillusioned, drunken soldier, astoundingly misread it as 'light verse') or the opinion of a trusted critic-friend motivated such exclusion, when a different magazine editor, or another friend, might have reacted otherwise.

Reading other poems and drafts, especially those for the 'Aubade' and 'Elegy for Lota de Macedo Soares', one is aware that, however powerful the draft, Bishop might never have been able to complete the sequence, even as a sober octogenarian. Yet Bishop cited 'Elegy' as a book-length poem in progress in a grant application completed two years before her death: it is clear (as possible) that she regarded this as work-in-progress for eventual publication, not on a different level of privacy than her other work.

There is a critical orthodoxy proposed in some circles that posits, almost parallel and apace with the New York theatre pieces and Brazilian novels about incidents in Bishop's life, her achievements and failings, that any consideration of her work must exist, New Critical style, apart from that work's origins. But the profound revelations of Alice Quinn's edition of Bishop's uncollected poems are not of the identities of lovers, friends, editors or mentors, or the recounting of actual incidents referred to in a given poem (there is no information of this sort here which may not be found in the extant critical biographies, journal articles or published correspondence); they are, rather, about the formal decisions and trains of thought (un train peut cacher un autre) which went into the ongoing, often long-ongoing, composition of Bishop's poetry.

Who wouldn't wish, not at all for prurient reasons, to have access to Auden's work-in-progress, just as most of us still read and reread poems he excised from his oeuvre after publication - like 'September 1, 1939', which blazed across the Web in 2001? Or to drafts Keats had in notebooks at his early death, or Thomas Hardy at his late demise? We have had access to Pound's editing of The Waste Land, and neither Eliot's nor Pound's reputation, nor the poem's has suffered for it. Would we want to read Yeats' or HD's scraps from the factory floor? Probably.

But in Bishop's case, knowing for example that a magisterial poem like 'The Moose' was created in 1972 (when a request was made for a Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard!) from notes and drafts made decades earlier, we have the peculiar but rewarding sense of being reader-witnesses to much of what might have been, had Bishop simply lived longer.

Not many poets compose as Bishop did, putting drafts aside for years, but with the decided intention of completing them, taking them out and working on them intermittently over long spans of time. Seeing this slow motion work in progress (with the frequent illustration of hand and typewritten drafts in facsimile, sometimes accompanied by sketches) doesn't illustrate how a 'poet' works; it does allow readers entry into this poet's fairly unique method, and provides as well (I think) a valuable insight from the point of view of craft into the poems Bishop included in her published books.

Are there poems in this book that equal Bishop's masterpieces such as 'Brazil, January I, 1502', 'The Moose', and 'In the Waiting Room'? I don't think so. Are there poems which contextualize the major poems, thematically and formally? Absolutely. It is fascinating to know that Bishop had completed only one villanelle, 'Verdigris', in 1950 (included here) before writing 'One Art' in 1976, but that she had sketched in prose a nightmare 'Villanelle' in the late 1930s, and had always been attracted by the form as a vehicle for the ominous and obsessional.

While Bishop observed considerable discretion during her lifetime in the publication of love poems, erotic poems, or even domestic poems ('Shampoo' being the only one in which her shared life with Lota explicity figures), now that 'a penny life can tell you all the facts', the powerfully reticent sensuality of the dawn thunderstorm ('It is marvelous to wake up together...') and of the crystal rock-roses revelatory of the lover's intimate body ('Vague Poem/Vaguely Love Poem') only affirms that Bishop as a poet was as equal to her own biography as she was to the various geographies she inhabited. These poems are fine and finished, and increase the breadth and heft of the complete work.

Others, like the drafts of 'Homesickness' in both verse and prose, concerning the poet's mother's youth in Nova Scotia, with the related drafts of Nova Scotia poems, leave the reader at once elated (because what there is is so good, because this glimpse of linked composition in two gemes is so revelatory) and regretful that the work never was finished. But the satisfaction well outweighs the regret.

About the Author
Marilyn Hacker's new and selected poems, Essays on Departure, was published in Carcanet's Oxford Poets Series last year, and was reviewed by Carol Rumens in the Spring 2007 issue of Poetry London. She is also the author of Desesperanto (WW Norton, 2003) and the translator of She Says by Venus Khoury-Ghata (Graywolf Press, 2003) and of Birds and Bison by Claire Malroux (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004). She lives in New York and Paris.

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